Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

6-2024

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

M.A.

Program

Liberal Studies

Advisor

Anna Akasoy

Committee Members

David Humphries

Subject Categories

American Material Culture | American Popular Culture | Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Keywords

subculture, fashion, political aesthetics

Abstract

"Stolen Valor: Mapping the Style Subcultures of the Left'' performs an analysis of three observed style subcultures prevalent in American fashion between the 2000s and the 2020s and demonstrates how these distinct style languages each draw from the aesthetics of various 20th and 21st century Leftist political movements, discussing the extent to which each style subculture undergoes a process of appropriation by the dominant culture and subsequent subsumption into the mainstream compared to the extent to which the subversive communicative power of each subculture remains intact for the original adopting population. The three style vernaculars this text identifies will be referred to as: ‘New York City streetwear,' aesthetically rooted in 1970s-1990s West Coast skateboarding and surf culture and 1980s-2000s East Coast hip-hop culture and prevalent among the New York City creative class of the 2010s and 2020s; ‘Silicon Valley normcore,’ a style of dress associated with 2000s-2020s tech sector workers but which traces the evolution of its aesthetic DNA to the styles of dress of the Old Left and the Black Panther Party; and an emerging style subculture this text will refer to as ‘pessimistic clinical horny,’ coined in part by culture writer Cara Schacter, that emerges from an appropriation of the styles of dress and self-presentation most commonly associated with sex workers, remixed with futuristic design elements that reflect nihilistic cultural and political attitudes of early 2020s urban America. This niche style subculture inspired numerous cultural critiques in the early 2020s, revealing the emergence of an intensely self-conscious, persona-focused approach to dressing that demonstrates important aspects of the current social and political climate; namely, the United States’ participation in multiple concurrent international wars and the overarching nihilistic aesthetic of the COVID era. The adherence by the cosmopolitan creative classes to one of these three fashion aesthetics demonstrates that visual communication in the form of personal presentation has the power to facilitate the formation of social groups, providing a sense of community and hope for the future to the few who manage to gain entry. Elizabeth Wissinger’s critique of mandatory and gendered glamor labor applies to the microcultural groups defined by these three styles of personal expression, as does Kathy Peiss’ idea of the “compulsory work” of beautification—in the increasingly diverse and niche social groups of the 2020s, made possible by the universal access to connection afforded by the online communities formed on social media, this glamor and beautification labor is less solely subject to the oppressive institutionalized forces of misogyny, classism, and racism, and is operating increasingly according to the varied internal logics of niche social groups. Additionally, this labor of presentation may serve more specific purposes: reflecting prevailing contemporary attitudes of survival anxieties and political resistance and communicating the wearer’s participation in a lineage of Leftist political aesthetic, if not direct political activity. This text compiles visual and journalistic evidence to thoroughly define each proposed subculture, map their emergence from anti-establishment political aesthetic lineages, and trace their subsumption into the dominant culture (the extent to which the style has become respectable to mainstream consumerist culture) versus the extent to which each style subculture retains its original power according to its original and early adopters.

This text’s analysis is in dialogue with the work of Elizabeth Wissinger’s work on “glamor labor” and the impact of celebrity culture on the communicative power of dress; Tansy E. Hoskins’ analysis of cultural theft in fashion; Dean Kissick’s writing on the nihilist aesthetics of the 2020s and the function of visual personae in an internet-forward society; Malcolm Harris’s work on the history of Silicon Valley and the evolution of the aesthetics of the political Left from The Old Left to the Black Panther Party to contemporary Bay Area fashion; and the work of additional scholars and culture writers on the topics of the history of streetwear, the history of punk, critiques of contemporary consumer culture, and analyses of celebrity image-making. This text makes use of the theoretical frameworks of Ernst Harms’ concept of the psychology of clothing, and Elizabeth Wilson’s important work on postmodernism, cultural contradiction, and the defense of fashion as a topic worthy of scholarly attention. A key theoretical underpinning of this text is Dick Hebdige’s connection of fashion to the formation and communication of subcultures, and particularly his demonstration of the ease with which the meanings attached to the signifiers of a certain style subculture can be purposefully distorted or overthrown, and thereby subsumed into the dominant culture. Hebdige names two distinct processes of subsumption: the first, the commodity form, functions by "translating the original innovations” which define the subculture into commodities, rendering these innovations “frozen, codified, made comprehensible,” characterizing this process as one of trivialization, naturalization, and domestication. The second process, the ideological form, relies on the re-labeling and re-definition of deviant behavior as newly acceptable by dominant groups, thereby stripping what was once considered taboo, powerful, and resistant into something ubiquitous, tame, and politically impotent (Hebdige 94-96). Both processes are at work in the defanging of the New York City streetwear, Silicon Valley normcore, and several contemporary cosmopolitan style microcultures , all of which claim aesthetic roots in American Leftist resistance, and all of which simultaneously do manage to retain some modicum of their original communicative power for a segment of their original adopting populations.

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